Music reviews Kymatik

Music reviews Kymatik

Music Reviews

The purpose of this page is to provide added exposure
to musicians I respect. The bar is set high. To pass Landschaft quality
control, the music must be of a quality that meets or surpasses the standard
that would secure them a commercial recording release, and/or that I feel
an itch to do a Landschaft mix of. I do not review everything they produce
- see the band's own websites for complete chronologies - what I review
is what I encounter, when I encounter it.

Kymatik: 12 May 2008

Metadata: Album review The Paignton Anomaly. Overview:
Kymatik are a collaboration / collective for this project comprising Mr
McNoughton and Mark Tamea, joint working again after a break of 10 years
or so. Both artists are highly accomplished experimentalists pushing the
boundaries of sound sculpture (music is rather a limiting descriptor that
I have avoided using for this review).

I sit and listen. To The Paignton Anomaly - by candle-light
in the late night after the city has fallen silent. The flame connecting
me to this complex elemental work, a sublimation of some rare solid into
the air.

I ponder the paradox. The work, an evocation of time
on the geological scale before culture and the concept of association
existed. There is not humour, wit or irony at play here, only a pure distillation
of place and time. Postmodernism and referentiality are nowhere to be
found and that absence of cultural landmarks bestows on the work a mark
of honesty and self-assuredness that defy the conventions of representational
art.

The barest of melody acts as a carrier for the edgy
glitch work that constellations the two pieces. Raw a-tonal frequencies
define a sonic space both complex and economical. The term "minimal" does
not quite fit - the sounds are concealed, camouflaged - hiding among each
other.

Another listen - appraising from a different perspective.
Trying to build a different mental construct, to decode the sonic contours.
In a way that a smell can transport one to a sense of time and place.
Building associations from experience - by the nature of things, a journey
personal to each listener. That is perhaps the way to approach and appreciate
this work - each listener will bring their own associations to it. And
the sounds will act as catalyst joining and forming the listener-associations,
rather than impose a narrative. In this respect, the work is abstract
and succeeds on this most rarified level - it is a tool that makes sense
of things. Existential in nature, the listener builds his or her own associations,
free from artificial cultural constructs - this work recursively builds
upon itself.